Kids on bikes

I was a kid on bikes. I didn’t realize I was a genre until recently. We’re the stars of ’80s movies (E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial; The Goonies), and we take centre stage in their nostalgia-vibe ensuants as well (Super-8; Stranger Things; Star Wars: Skeleton Crew). We’re sympathetic with (and likely overlap with, Vennwise) latchkey kids, Gen X core, although we’re also their active opposites (instead of letting ourselves into the house, we let ourselves out). We got up to weird shit in the ravine, finding aliens, making slime, making out. Everything was a clue, a way in. Secret hatches. Ancient tunnels. Buried starships.

None of that actually happened IRL, of course. (Except the thing about the slime.) It was the potentiality of the thing that I remember, flying along on my Norco, high on the bars, the wind through what was then my hair. No helmet. I laid my Norco down once, in a patch of needle-sharp gravel that used to line the sides of roads in my neighbourhood which (for reasons no one can elucidate) were never given sidewalks, slid across that field of glass like Bruce Willis and came up just as bloody. A two-inch gash in my knee like a talking vagina, it needed stitches only I never got them, so instead, I got a forever scar. Kids on bikes got scars.

I got a helmet eventually. Don’t you worry, I am very helmet-pro. I was down somewhere — god, I don’t even know where, except that it was definitely somewhere you’re not supposed to go with a bike — somewhere in Sunnybrook, perhaps, off-trail, thundering down the interior of the ravine trackless, and I saw (just in time) a fallen tree across the non-path I had chosen to plunder — I was moving quite rapidly at the time — so I ducked, and just barely, just barely, got under it… or most of me did. My head didn’t. My head went straight into the thing, helmet-first, WUNCH, and I ate shit, tumbled into the bushes, less out of anything having gone wrong with my balance and more because I was so thoroughly surprised by the sheer thereness of the impact. I can still recall it. I came up with a log-sized dent in my helmet, the crown stove in. “Wunch.” Only two years before, I’d have been helmetless.

Most kids on bikes, in the movies anyway, rove in packs. Not me. For one thing almost no one could keep up with me, and even if they could, there would be the strange feeling that I was meant to carry on conversation, instead of just ride, disappearing into the hyperspace above my mind and have all the adventures that other creators have long since turned into movies and scripts and short Claymation films. The one exception to the no-packs policy was my friend Geoff; we’d ride together. He was on the same wavelength as me, hyperspacewise. We were having the same adventures in our minds, synced up like Jaeger pilots. One time, we rode down by the river and Geoff got to watch as I dismounted my bike to do some questing, except that in real life I dropped the bike handlebar-first into a nearby hornet’s nest; and thank goodness for the river there, is all I can say about what happened next.

I wonder. I wonder what the observable reality of my “kids on bikes” era actually was. Sometimes I get in trouble with this blog because it’s a reflection of how I remember the feelings of things, rather than an actual documentation of fact. Surely, my parents were around — a lot — when I was growing up. Surely, I did not (as often as I think I did, anyway) just walk out the back door, grab the bike from the shed, disappear down the driveway and then come back “later.” There must have been plans, appointments, check-ins; perhaps not the impenetrable patchwork of Outlook Calendar postage-stamps that govern an under-adolescent’s life nowadays, but something. Summers, surely, were not just 10 uninterrupted weeks of nothing to do but ride (and the cottage, on the weekend). But they felt that way.

The far center

I haven’t the faintest idea who Pamela Paul is, or whether I ever read her. I do know I am grateful for whatever career she might have had, which I learn has ended recently, because that career served as grist for Andrea Long Chu’s most recent longread, for which I am always grateful.

One should, I think, always read authors one admires (and I don’t know that there are toooooo many writers, at least in this format, that I admire more than Chu) even if one does not know anything about what they’re writing about. The writing they’ll do, of course, will fill in the gaps; that’s what makes them great at it. And then on top of that, as always, “Goodbye Pamela Paul” gives us Chu’s searing inquiry into what it all means, what the deeper inflections are behind the subject’s face-visible career. And that’s how we get to Chu invoking the premise of “the far center.”

This is going to be with me a long time. The relevant pullquote:

“I think of it as the far center: a loose coalition of disillusioned Democrats, principled humanists, staid centrists, anti-woke journalists, civil libertarians, wronged entertainers, skeptical academics, and toothless novelists, all brought together by their shared antipathy to what they regard as the illiberal left. The far center is for free speech and bourgeois institutions; it is against cancel culture, student protests, and radicalism of any kind. Yet it rejects the idea of a shared ideology or politics. Instead, its members see themselves as independently sane individuals — concerned citizens who wish only to defend civil society from the unbearable encroachments of politics. So the far center is liberal, in that its highest value is freedom; but it is also reactionary, in that its vision of freedom lacks any corresponding vision of justice.”

Woof. I suppose the good news about having something like that laid out in clear prose is that I now understand an enormous number of furiously vague motivations among some of the people in my life, better than I did last week. Whether they’re reply-guys “just asking questions,” or wise elders weighing in on the humanity of people they’ve never met because to suggest they not do so is “anti-democratic,” these Independently Sane Individuals are the secret cancer of every single body of folks who, on their face, consider themselves faithfully progressive even though every single thing about liberation drives them quietly nuts. Be on the lookout, as the cops would say.

On a tangent, this, too, will be in my head for a while; though more as a lol:

JK Rowling after years of amplifying transphobic hate and misinformation: The fascists are saying the same thing as me and it's YOUR FAULT

— Katy Montgomerie 🦗 (@katymontgomerie.com) February 7, 2025 at 9:36 AM

On the ins and outs of embeds in Ghost.io newsletters

That 👆🏼, above, was an embed. Or rather, it was meant to be.

While the platform that sends out my newsletter has a preview mode, that preview mode seems much more accurately a “web browser experience” preview mode and less so a “what the email will look like” preview mode. As such, I was alerted to the fact that some embeds in last week’s email did not appear as intended.

Here’s a YouTube embed of this week’s video:

Here’s a link to it, in case that embed didn’t work.

And here’s a reminder that if something like that ever comes up borked in a newsletter email, you can always click the title of the email (all the way up at the top!) to visit the browser version of the message.

Kids (still) on bikes

Writing, this week, did not go well. More accurately, I suppose, it did not go to plan. The path kept branching off in unexpected directions or fully dead-ending in front of me. That’s fine. There’s another way out of this thicket around here somewhere — there always is.